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Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 by Barry MacSweeney. Bloodaxe. 334pp; £12.00.

Sacramental Sonnets by Alison Bielski.
Alun Books, 3 Crown Street, Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, SA13 1BG. 60pp; £5.99.

In the hundred years from Tennyson through to the death of Dylan
Thomas, the lyric reigned. Poets made periodic attempts to keep the
long poem going, whether in The Ring and the Book, Paterson or the Cantos; but the thing that mattered to the public was the short poem of around a page, or perhaps two or three. Poems, in the eyes of the common reader, were supposed to rhyme and scan, even if the nature of rhyming or scanning was a movable feast, as the traditional forms broke down under the impact of counting by stress, rather than syllable, and later the experiments of Owen and others made rhyme a darker more various sound. But even the poets, when they broke away from rhyme and meter into Free Verse, still aimed to create a musical short poem, in which the sound and rhythm of the syllables interacted to create a mood (as witness, Eliot, Edith Sitwell, H.D. William Carlos Williams etc). But then, starting in the Fifties, the whole direction of poetry altered. Sound and rhythm, let alone rhyme and meter, were taken to represent something old fashioned and élitist, and sense became the thing to worry about. To the ear of one contemporary who lived through the change, an awful lot seemed to get lost at this point. Sense in prose is an admirable thing, the clearer the better, one feels. But the whole point of poetry is to convey mood as well as sense. The result of the shift away from the interaction of sound and rhythm, has been much poetry that no doubt says something, but says it in a way that is overly personal, and waste paper shortly after. However, the worst result has been a division between the public, who still expect something of the old forms and feelings that derive from sounds and rhythms, and the poets, who seem all too often to have drifted into a ghetto, where
everyone shares their neuroses. But at this point of course it is verboten to get too far into the underlying subconscious feelings and dreamsensations, which would lead back to the Romantics, or forward to the  Surrealists, and away from Realism. Moreover any idea of rhythm, sound, or form, is close to abhorrent. As with all generalisations, there are of course exceptions to this statement, but it is also uncomfortably close to how it is.

   But this is not the whole story. There is another problem. Popular
and serious art have diverged in the last fifty years, as rarely in our
history. In poetry (though much the same could be said of music or
painting) we have tended to go for either the populist expression of the pop lyric, or something almost excessively ascetic. The sort of fusion of High and Low art that produced Mozart say, or allowed Shakespeare and others to make out of the essentially low art of the Elizabethan play, something which ultimately seems very high art, is noticeably missing. And yet back in the Sixties, such fusions were common. The Beatles’ best music indeed was a fusion of Classic, Pop and Jazz, and Indian elements, and the classical music of the Tippett Third Symphony was not that far away. That spirit of crossover also had a certain presence in poetry. Somehow however all that passed very quickly, and the Sixties today are remembered as a period of rebellion only, and not a time of sudden unlikely fusions.

   Both the poets under review have suffered from these contradictions in the world they operated in. Bielski is more obviously a “conservative” than MacSweeney, but it is a very skin deep conservatism. She starts from the base of the old lyric forms, but she does something startling with them, which goes beyond her dislike of punctuation: modern speech is suddenly found capable of precisely the lyric movement which – it is usually implied – it is not able to achieve. MacSweeney is more irregular, but imparts to his movement something of the lyrical, whether he derives it from the Blues (as in the 1997 Book of Demons) or William Byrd (as in parts of Ranter from the early 1980’s).

   Further, MacSweeney was one of the classic examples of an artist, who in the present ghettoisation, tends to get flak by turns from every school, that is sure it knows best, because he could not be bothered to belong to a school, but went where the Muse directed. His course indeed was one of constant 180 degree changes of direction. He began rather experimentally with the poems that were collected in the Fulcrum Press Book Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard, a young poet and journalist from Newcastle, who was to some degree under Bunting’s influence, but who was also showing signs of contact with the Cambridge School (if school it was) of Prynne, James, Oliver and others. And indeed his work appears in the private journal of that grouping The English Intelligencer. However, he then shifted feet, and wrote the fine ‘pop’, often love poems, that Hutchinson published as The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother in 1968, before the more difficult Fulcrum book appeared. This was genuinely a success with the public, and MacSweeney appeared at that point a more upmarket part of the Pop Poetry Scene, of which Patten is perhaps the finest examplar.

   This caused havoc to MacSweeney’s career. A very serious poet
was labelled pop at a time when the two were increasingly felt to be
wholly incompatible. And this old argument is still causing havoc, for
the Hutchinson book has been ridiculously reduced to two poems in
this selection. This may well have been MacSweeney’s own decision, for he came to feel (not without cause) that he had been ruthlessly exploited by Hutchinson, but it is a regrettable one, for it makes for a book which leads one straight into MacSweeney, the radical Modernist, and that I suspect many will find difficult. However, let us be grateful for what we have got, which is some of the most real poetry of the last thirty years of the Twentieth Century; and all too much of it has been hidden away in little books and pamphlets, that had little circulation at their first publication. But even that is not the whole story, for MacSweeney’s desperate fight with alcoholism in the Nineties, suddenly produced the sort of intensely personal poetry that the modern poetry world adores, and Bloodaxe duly published it, and McSweeney was discovered yet again. And before that, Paladin, in the person of Ian Sinclair, had given MacSweeney a very reasonable selection of his work of the Seventies and Eighties, albeit a selection that the publishers pulped with quite indecent haste. Anyhow, as a result of the success of
MacSweeney the repentant alcoholic, we do now get a real selection of his work made generally available, which one can only welcome, however it has happened.

   So what in this book do I like? Not, I think, The Book of Demons, which I find frequently sprawling and rhetorical, though no doubt in some quarters it will be taken as saying real things to real people. However, even in the Nineties MacSweeney produced a lovely sequence of poems about a childhood friendship in the Northumberland countryside, that was his alternative to Newcastle. The Pearl poems need close reading, and cannot really be adequately described in a short review, but they are genuinely fresh. Not least, they portray among much else the real modern country side. Back in the Eighties the long poem Ranter has a lovely music (far more so than Ken Smith, who crossed a similar territory), and hymns the disruptive elements that have their value to society, but cannot be absorbed into it during their lifetime. ‘Colonel B’, back in the Seventies is full of Pop Culture, and highly disjointed, but it does capture the madness of the late Seventies and the coming threat of Thatcherism as very few other things have done, and it does have a verve Shelley or Chatterton (both favourites of MacSweeney) would have appreciated, despite the totally different idiom. And finally, at the beginning of the Seventies, is the splendid Brother Wolf, which is a meditation by turns on Chatterton, and life in the England of circa 1970. It is written as a series of variations, which can make a first reading seem repetitive, but it has a wonderful music that grows and grows in the mind, by turns deeply serious and comic. And there is a good deal else, not least the surprisingly Yeatsian/ Swinburnian Finnbar’s Lament, where an ancient myth subsumes MacSweeney’s own difficult, but somehow loveable character. This is indeed a book to be continually surprised by, whose subversive freshness promises a longer life than most of its contemporaries.

   The music of Bielski’s Sacramental Sonnets, by contrast, is more
formal. It has regular metre and interesting, unusual rhyme. It is a
sonnet sequence, that runs from one New Year to the next Christmas. It is, moreover, contemporary with Ranter and Colonel B, having been written around 1982, but only now published in full. This makes it sound staid, but it is not. It is partly that there is a fresh, real, lyric music, just as there is in MacSweeney, that is of its time, but has deep roots. This is much more apparent over the whole sequence than the individual poems. In a sense there is not a lot to say: this is a real life in a real time. And yet the sequence is somehow mythical, and not at all about Reality. Perhaps Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo, where he makes of his relationship with Byron a provoking fiction, provides a loose parallel. However that may be, this is an elusive, powerful book, that deserves a wide audience.

   Perhaps both these unusual books, with their powerful individual
musics, will serve to provide the links with the old poetry we are
desperately short of today, and lead towards a new, revived lyric voice.